me & my bompa

Getting baptized.
And loved.

I've never seen this shot before -- my little brother (right. too old to be little. but he's still my little brother.) just posted it to Facebook.

See that grin on my Bompa's face? That's how you know you're with family.

Happy Birthday to me.

speaking of steinways & hearths

speaking of steinways & hearths
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

This is my grandfather's Steinway.

For a long time it lived in the house that Bompa built, nestled between the dining room and his richly outfitted bar that smelled sweet like the masterful martinis that cooked his liver and put him in his grave.

He was a WWII vet who saw Guadalcanal and told great stories about beer rations and contests with sawdust and ice and deep pits dug on South Pacific beaches to see who could keep their beer the coldest for longest in that tropical heat. He told the story of how, as a communications officer, he and a few fellow soldiers were left on the island to create radio chatter while the others shipped out for elsewhere, in the hope the enemy would hear and presume the island was still occupied.

The others shipped out in a hurry and left all their beer behind.

My Bompa told that story laughing; told of the plunder; the abandoned beer pits like sea turtle nests loaded with fresh eggs.

He never mentioned the fear of being a lonely mark for Japanese bombs.

When I'd ask him to tell me a war story -- a real battle story -- he'd say he spent his time hiding out in pineapple fields, and then he'd make another martini, tenderly working the essence of a lime peel around the rim of his glass.

Once I found and furtively read a letter he wrote to his mother from the Pacific theater. The images are all I recall: the dark fear of an air raid and then, the planes gone, the slow stirrings, the murmurs of conversation, and out of the warming stillness: the sound of a piano, playing.

The letter closed with words of gratitude and love.

The Steinway was his one holy relic, and still he let his grandkids pound on it. "Careful. Gently," he'd urge us. But still: He let us.

My sister and I played Heart and Soul on this keyboard so often that he insisted on paying for lessons one summer so he could hear something else.

My aunt has it now. I snapped this on my cameraphone when I was in Seattle at the tail end of July. Her grandson managed to nick a corner off the right hand side. I winced when I saw the jagged break, composite layers of deep red varnish peeled back under the serene concert hall black, like a freshly skinned knee flushed wet with the rising blood.

dedication

embiggen »

Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, 1938 printing.
Inscribed from my grandfather to my grandmother.

hear the falls roar

Classic Grama story, which I’ve heard countless times: She and my Bompa were dating. They daytripped up to the magnificent Snoqualmie Falls in the Cascade Range (my Bompa loved to daytrip; loved to drive). Parked the car.

As they made their approach to the Falls, which were still out of sight, my Grama exclaimed: “Oh! Hear the Falls roar!”

At last they arrived at the Falls. Which were not roaring.

It may have been that there was no rainfall; it may have been that the diversionary dam was doing its job too well. Grama reports a small trickle. No roar. And utter embarrassment.

My grandfather must have found it charming somehow, because they wound up married anyway.

(God I miss hearing her tell her stories.)

Took this holga somewhere in Mexico. It was a wonderful undulating unending cascade of falls from one to the next spanned by slippery foot bridges. Swallows darted in and out of the falls into the cool caves that they lived in behind the cascades.

It was lovely.

walking the locks

When I was a kid my sister and I spent frequent weekends at my grandparents' place on Three Tree Point in their "Princess Suite" -- the Mother-in-Law apartment over the garage that they renovated after my Great Gram passed away.

It was a crazy mash up of Danish modern furnishings and flocked wallpaper, my Bompa's idea of high style.

Weekends meant waffles and classic movies (Zorro or Shane or the Sound of Music which would send my grandmother into her own trilling rendition of Climb Every Mountain) -- and field trips. The University of Washington when the cherry trees bloomed in the Quad. Long drives through my Bompa's old neighborhood or around the Peninsula. The Garden Room at Frederick and Nelson's to lunch on chicken pot pie.

Field trips in the spring when the salmon were running meant a drive to the Ballard Locks to see Bompa's Fish.

Which bored me to tears.

Fish. Swimming. Upstream.

Got it.

But I never said that out loud. And although Bompa may have guessed that I was barely interested he never tried to win me over. We just walked the locks. And watched the fish. And monitored the tedious passage of boats and ships from fresh to salt water and back again.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how that gentle meditation worked its way into my bones. How the muscle memory is triggered every time I go back to that place, like I did this last weekend, to walk the locks, and watch the fish, and the passage of ships.

How it summons up the memory of his brisk walk beside me, his gentle gestures, the swell of his chest as he breathed in the excitement and watched his fish run.

Got it.

speaking of the magnificent things man has made

a found poem

Everything here
seems bound
for someplace else

The grain goes down
the river
the trains speed through
the little towns
the interstate highway
is full of long-haulers
and out-of-state
license plates

I can hear
the soft chatter
of a kingfisher

I can hear
the bushes rustle
where a marmot roots
near the water's edge

I can hear
the cars plying
the bridge between
Engineer's Town
and the reservation

But except
for the slightest swish
coming from a thin
strand of water
that emerges from
halfway down
the dam's
otherwise
dry spillway

The night is devoid
of the sound of water


Found in Matt Rasmussen's Pastures of Plenty in Orion, a piece about Woody Guthrie's involvement as a songwriter hired to shill for the Columbia River Dam project in the 1930s.

Rasmussen's piece is elegiac and heartbreaking, beautifully capturing the tension between power of place and our pursuit of that thing called Progress and how it stilled the teeming Colombia where the salmon have now gone missing.

My Bompa would burst into Guthrie's Roll On Columbia when we crossed the bridge that spans the great river. He loved the Pacific Northwest with a passion, but he was also of the generation that believed it could be harnessed for our use, at no detriment to its nature.

I don't know what he would say to hear the salmon aren't running: I remember the first time he took me to the Ballard Locks to watch the fish run, how he was nearly giddy then. How in subsequent years, as the run grew smaller, the fish more demure, he seemed disquieted but inconclusive, unsettled as if he were unsure how such magnificent engineering could produce something some puny and small.

I know if he were still alive his heart would break to hear the news of this season's salmon run, and I suspect he would noodle it in silence, his head bent low over the paper, his face pursed with the quiet rage and worry of a broken promise revealed.

bompa's camel hair coat

I'm writing this wrapped in my Bompa's camel hair coat in the chill of a Taos evening. It was a gift from my brother. My little brother (who's all grown up, actually) has had the coat since just after Bompa died and my grandmother passed it along to him. The shoulders worked out all right, but the sleeves hit him about mid-way down his forearms so it hasn't gotten a whole lot of use.

While we were knocking around Madrid, NM yesterday after a long dusty hike up the Tent Rocks he asked if I would like to have it. I said yes, hugged him, and then hugged him a few more times after that. Trying not to cry.

I have two sharp memories of this jacket, a man's blazer. The first was when my Bompa brought it home, brand new, and made me inspect it with him, marveling over how well made it was, the quality of the materials. I started off humoring him, but before it was over I was convinced. He was an attorney after all -- he knew how to make a case.

But I was something else too: I was schooled. I learned something about quality and care and buying something solid that would last.

The other memory is from my Bompa's funeral. My sister and I delivered his eulogy together, a recitation of all that he taught us -- how to love Hood Canal Oysters and Walla Walla Sweet Onions and waffles and omlettes made just right (that is, made by him).

How to love long drives and silly songs about fat boys who turned the neighborhood pets into sausage (not kidding. great song. a bit morbid and not at all politically correct, but a great song.). We ended by reciting how he taught us our grandmother was the most beautiful woman in the world -- and there all the good cheer was almost destroyed by the tears.

But I choked them down and moved on to the reception where I was nearly startled again when one of his oldest friends told me story after story of all the stories my Bompa told him -- about his grandkids. How he bragged without mercy and bored his friends. Something I had no idea he was in the habit of doing. And then he said: "He sure was proud of you kids."

But I managed to keep the tears throttled back.

And it wasn't until later, when the Spring chill of a Pacific Northwest evening settled in that my brother offered me the coat to fend off the cold and I threaded my arms through its gentle drape into its ambient warmth, the shoulders a bit large but the sleeves that he had had tailored *just so* falling just where they should against my wrists; it wasn't until then that I couldn't stop the tears anymore; it wasn't until then that I slipped into the bathroom and I locked the door and I cried.

bompa's waffles

KEY
plaintext = from the back of the Bisquick box
italics = from my Bompa

2 cups Original Bisquick mix
2 tbsp vegetable oil melted butter
1 1/3 cups milk (best that it's whole milk)
1 egg separated; beat the white into frothy peaks

STIR ingredients until well blended but do it like this: 1) sift the Bisquick into the bowl and 2) make a careful well in the center where you will 3) drop in the egg yolk, break it with your whisk, and initiate the stir before 4) introducing the milk and then, when you've whisked your mixture to be lump free set the whisk aside and 5) carefully, CAREFULLY, fold in the egg white.

POUR onto the center of hot greased waffle iron you'll know it's hot when the light winks out. Do not attempt to make the waffle before the light winks out, even if your granddaughters, still in their PJs, their long skinny legs hanging over the stools that lift them up high over the counter where you're making the waffles, appear to be terribly, terribly hungry. Famished even. And excited, because they've had your waffles before. (Please Note: Grease the waffle iron with butter. By all means: it must be butter.); close lid.

BAKE about 5 min or until steaming stops. (the steaming must stop. trust no other indicator.) Carefully remove waffle.

To Reheat Heat waffles in toaster until crisp. DO NOT reheat a waffle. Make only what you can eat hot off the iron. Do not warm a waffle in the oven; all waffle eaters must be in attendance when the batter hits the grill.

To EAT Allow the grandchildren to top their own, but after they've gorged on several smeared thick with soft butter and maple syrup, recommend that they just may want to try one like you like yours: saturated with melted butter, topped with a thick even crust of cinnamon sugar.

And you will find that they do.

Optional: Serve with bacon. Maybe some eggs.

tender buttons

I don’t remember exactly how I came by this shirt, a classic Aloha from Hawai'i. I have a vague recollection of my grandmother pulling it, musty, from the closet many months after my grandfather had died, and asking me did I want it?

Of course I did.

It’s so unlike anything I remember my Bompa wearing: he loved fine clothes, but his passion was for the texture, touch, and feel of the fabric. It’s not so much that I don’t remember him wearing bold colors and patterns as it is that I remember him being very finely tailored, always -- which made him nice to hug.

I remember his excitement when he called me over to show me the camel hair coat that he had just bought for himself -- it wasn't enough to say "beautiful, Bompa" -- we reviewed every stitch and seam of that jacket together. And I loved every minute of it. It's why I bought one for myself, years later. It's why I think of him every time I put it on.

Even his stories were populated with scenes from the wardrobe: Like the time he had a suit made for my father in Hong Kong while he was still a teenager – and my dad grew so fast that he outgrew the suit before he had a chance to wear it. Or the time that my Bompa pulled out his Stetson to show to a friend from the Philippines, and how his friend misunderstood and took the show-and-tell as a special honor – and believed the hat was my grandfather’s gift to him.

Of course Bompa followed through, and of course the hat went home with his friend. And of course he grieved when he told that story. (He really loved that hat.)

I remember too, spending the summer with my grandparents during my freshman year in college, and my grandmother becoming deeply involved in the planning of her high school reunion. Turned out an old boyfriend of hers was on the same organizing committee, and paid her generous amounts of attention. My grandfather’s response was to go shopping and return with a stunning skirt and sweater set for my grandmother: dressing up his beautiful bride with pride. Grama ate it up. We didn’t hear much about the old boyfriend after that.



So although I can't remember him ever wearing anything this bold, I do remember him boldly loving Hawai'i, and that's enough to make me love this shirt.

His Aloha is a sturdy cotton – unlike the silk or rayon that Aloha shirts were traditionally made of – with a stamped print pattern and tender Chinese coin-like buttons. I was reminded that it was stashed away in my closet when I was poking around the Patagonia site and found an essay in honor of the Aloha Shirt. (Alongside Patagonia product of course, but they’re not a bad bunch of shirts, if you like Aloha Shirts; and the essay itself is worth reading for this clip alone: "He told me that in life there are two kinds of people; people of substance and those with little or no substance, and that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit no matter how you slice or dice it.")

I’d always assumed that Bompa’s shirt dated to the 1950s, when my grandparents spent a good amount of time in Hawai’i, but according to the Gerry Lopez piece it was around that time that the manufacture of Aloha shirts moved away from the islands (he doesn’t say to where – Asia maybe?) where they could be created more cheaply.



So I either have a rare shirt from before the decline of island production, or one of the shirts that re-emerged after the craft returned in the late 60s and early 70s. Or a shirt with a label that lies when it says “Made in Hawaii.”

Either way, it’s my Bompa’s.

Bompa was not a tall man, and given that I’m quite a tall girl, you’d think I’d be out of luck trying to wear one of his old shirts. But lucky for me it’s my legs that give me that height, and my torso, it turns out, is exactly his size (as are my hands, as I learned when I held his hand while he was dying – they were perfect twins, his hand and mine).

The shirt, I'm happy to report, hugs me just right.

Aloha is a Hawaiian greeting that encompasses the meaning of love, mercy and compassion. Having the aloha spirit meant living and giving these virtues. The aloha shirt is a symbol of the aloha spirit, and when a person wears the shirt, he also wears the aloha spirit.

— Gerry Lopez in Aloha

the malady of the quotidian

a found poem

There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin
which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live

in the city

and the greater the stray memories
and associations you build up.

Sometimes this sense of the city
can be greatly added to by history and by books;
sometimes, however, the past
and the books
hardly matter

seem a strange irrelevance.

On a busy day it is easy to go
into the GPO in O’Connell Street
without a single thought
for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse
or without remembering

for a second

that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend to
measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’
the ancient Irish hero
patron saint of pure ignorance and crass violence.

The need to buy a stamp
or a TV licence
or fill in a form
is often too pressing
the queues too long
the malady of the quotidian
too richly detailed to be bothered by heroes.

Found in Darlings: Colm Tóibín on Beckett’s Irish Actors in the 5 April issue of the London Review of Books.


It is a not insignificant artifact of my life that I am homeless. Meaning, that although I have more than sufficient shelter, I have no ancestral home to return to. The one that I might have claimed, my grandfather’s, was sold long ago, and my parents have long since moved elsewhere (each to a different destination) to places that have very little purchase in my heart, although they’re pleasant enough, all three (counting a step-parent in there).

For that reason, home for me means the company of the people I love. And, not insignificantly, the memory of their company is tied, concretely and discretely, to the places where we exchanged evidence of that mutual accord – through conversation, the squeeze of a hand, a shared look, a snug hug, a tumble beneath sheets.

I realized recently with a start that this specificity of geography in the landscape of my heart is also tied tightly to time. This occurred to me when, just this last week, I asked a colleague to let me off at the top of Taylor Street in San Francisco, with the intention of walking down to my hotel. I stepped out of the car and discovered that I was directly in front of my girlfriend M’s place – or at least where she was living when I visited her in the early 90s. She’s somewhere in Vermont now. I was just married at the time, to a man who would make me a chump, but I didn’t know that yet and thought myself luckier than most. It was a time bender, to stand there and remember a very different set of circumstances when I visited her back then; and to wonder how much of that Me is still left?

This is a question that comes to mind often lately: “Where have I gone?”

Or, more to the point: “Where am I?”

Traveling west of the Mississippi stirs it up the most, seeing friends that are tied, in my mind, to that landscape leaves me longing for a home that I’ve lost. Living in Chicagoland I feel sometimes that I’m a stranger to myself. This landscape doesn’t store up memories for me, and yet there’s something about the broad sweep and openness of this place that has become inhabited with parts of me that I’m still getting to know. Older. A bit more detached.

All of this came to mind as I read Colm Tóibín’s piece this morning in the London Review of Books, because it reminded me of crossing a street in Dublin just about a year ago now, and spotting a distinguished gentleman whose carriage emulated my Irish grandfather’s almost exactly. I embarrassed myself, without thinking, by stopping and staring with an impolite familiarity. Although I stood a distance from him my sudden stillness was enough to catch his attention and he turned to look, startled, at what I was up to. Our eyes locked. There was no smile, just puzzlement at the rude American. I wonder still how much I gave away. I wanted nothing so much at that moment in time than to sob and reach out to the ghosts that are my home and bring them close to me.

But of course, there’s no holding a ghost.

The moment passed, and we moved on.

road trip

Urban views 2
Originally uploaded by lasse22.

Lasse[1] shot this in Copenhagen (click through on the pic for a map), but it reminded me in an instant of Seattle's concrete highways, particularly the spot where 520 swoops past the Arboretum and becomes the Evergreen Floating Bridge (something about the coming Spring and the rising sap that's stirring old moments into memories that float tender and close to the surface. Not always optimal -- some of these trigger tremendous longing -- but what they hey, I'm letting them have their way).

Since I was a kid I've loved the concrete forms of Seattle's highways. Only once did I mention this out loud, and that was to my Bompa as we drove under and along them.

At the time I mentioned it, my Bompa and I knew each other the way any of us know family -- through mostly those things we've experienced together. I knew him always smiling, easy to hug, and smelling sweet of gin. I knew him setting the metronome and teaching me and my sister to play Heart and Soul (which he would so soon regret, because we took to it too readily and played it too much) on the lovely Steinway grand that lived just a small flight up from the spacious living room where we would push my toddler brothers on the wheeled ottoman at breakneck speed down the twisting hallways that serpentined through the house.

That was, until he spotted us and told us to stop (being the ogre, spoiling our fun) because he anticipated (correctly I believe) that we would soon crash through one of the tall glass panes that lined the hallway.

I didn't know then that he designed that house. I didn't know that he traded one of his clients legal work for that Steinway, at a loss, and that this was common for him -- that too often he took care of clients who couldn't take care of him. And I didn't know that he loved sweeping architectural forms and the way highways plot the progress of man so much that when the Alaskan Way Viaduct went up he took his young family, along with my small father, out for a day of driving -- back and forth and back and forth along the elevated roadway.

He said nothing about my observation, but I remember the moment clearly because I knew I had said something right when I gushed over that beautiful highway, by the smile and look of recognition that flashed across his face.

The way he looked at me then, like you look at an old friend.



[1] In his spare time, Lasse stacks wood.

tahoma

Mt Rainier never fails to make me gasp. It’s an involuntary action – my ex- used to tease me about it (before he was my ex-) – the clouds would part and we’d round a corner where the mountain would come into view. My jaw would drop and I’d audibly take in a rush of breath, startling anyone unlucky enough to be nearby, who for a moment would be certain something horrible was happening.

No. Just something astonishing.

If you’ve seen it, you know: A not-entirely-dormant volcano that rises heads and shoulders above its peers in the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges at almost 14 ½ thousand feet – higher than K2 – it’s Washington State’s Mt. Fuji.

My Bompa loved the mountain too, and one day as we were driving into town together, and he heard me gasp involuntarily when it came into view, he told me the story of how its original name was Tahoma (Wikipedia tells us that it was Puyallup name meaning “mouth of the waters”) and there was brief period when he was a kid when they thought about rolling back to that name -- but the white folks would have none of that (probably, he thought, the Seattle folks didn’t like how close it was to “Tacoma”, their rival city to the South), so Rainier stuck.

But once he told me that story I held on to the name, and when I was alone my gasp would transform into a greeting. “Tahoma.” It fit.

When my Bompa died one Seattle Spring, two events ushered in his passing. The first: The cherry trees that he loved and took us frequently to see in the University of Washington’s Quadrangle bloomed early.

I passed by the Quad just the day before I got my grandmother's call in the early pre-dawn, when she said: “He’s started his death rattle. My mother did this. Go back to sleep – it’s too early – but I wanted you to know.”

The day before when I had passed Quad, the day before I got her call, the blossoms caught my eye and made me turn my head. I gasped, of course -- they were so beautiful and bold and full of life.

Of course I didn’t go back to sleep the morning I received her call. Of course I pulled on the first thing I could find and piled myself into the car and drove the brief distance to Des Moines, where my grandparents were living, from Seattle, where I watched the slow passage of the barges across the Sound during the course of the day beside the hospital bed that we had set up for my grandfather in the living room, looking out over his long loved Three Tree Point.

We sat together all day, I read him the paper, fed him ice cubes, and later that afternoon he would die, in a passing that felt like a birth. I felt a powerful urge to take off my shoes, because the whole thing felt holy. I wish I had, but I was embarrassed because I had holes in my socks. They were the first ones I could find in the dark.

I suspected when Grandma called that Bompa would pass that day. But I knew for sure he was taking his leave when I drove through the Rainier Valley in the dawn, just as the sun was rising and a low fog obscured the strip usually populated with warehouses and shopping malls, and the sun rising reflected fiery and pink (the color of his cherry blossoms) off the low lying clouds and the white peaks of the mountain, Tahoma, calling him home.

The Mountain never looked so beautiful.